Venice film festival: Japanese director Kôji Fukada has crafted a richly painful and quietly comic human drama

Might the title be an instruction? If so, it’s not so easy to obey, judging from this movie from Japanese director Kôji Fukada who made such an impression with his sweet, Rohmeresque feature Goodbye Summer in 2013. (In fact, the title is taken from a Japanese pop song.) Love Life is an inexpressibly tragic and painful human drama about complicated lives, a movie that interleaves the utter desolation with a dry understated comedy and a sense of emotional tangle and chaos, a film that moreover blindsides its leading female character – and us, the audience – with an entirely unexpected coda section away from Japan in South Korea. In Shakespearean terms, this could be a filmic “problem play”.

A married young couple are living together in a small flat: Taeko (Fumino Kimura) and her husband Jiro (Kento Nagayama) and their lively eight-year-old son Keita (Tetsuda Shimada) who is a prize-winning national junior champ at the boardgame Othello. Keita is in fact Taeko’s son from her previous marriage to an expatriate Korean national named Park (Atom Sunada), a difficult, damaged man who is deaf; he abandoned Taeko and Keita and is now presumed to be living rough somewhere. Taeko and Keita learned sign language from their time with Park and use it to communicate secretly without Keita’s stepfather realising what they’re saying.